Search - Ashley Park :: Secretariat Motor Hotel

Recorded entirely in the Darling Music mobile recording studio, the "Secretariat Motor Hotel" begins where Ashley Park left us in 2001, sitting out on the back porch on that first dusty evening of summer, listening for the sounds of those cosmic childhood dreams and borrowed Canadiana scenes. With a move to London's prestigious Cherry Red Records (Sidewinder Sounds imprint) and Athens, Georgia's Happy Happy Birthday to Me Records, Ashley Park needed to find a good home for this record in their native Canada. To this end, the band created their own label Darling Music. Terry Miles was raised on twenty acres of land in rural Alberta. Just one half hour away from Calgary, Stampede country. But it is the fertile musical ground of Vancouver, B.C. Canada (Neko Case, the New Pornagraphers, Destroyer, Zumpano) that would eventually deliver the musical stylings of Ashley Park. In 2000, Ashley Park delivered "Town & Country" to Kindercore Records, and in 2001 the American Scene for London's home of Americana Loose Recordings (Neko Case, Giant Sand, Howe Gelb, Handsome Family). After their 2002 U.K. tour in support of the "American Scene", Kelly and Terry got home and drove down to the desert. Terry wrote a hundred songs about the people that might occupy a dusty (timeless and quite possibly fictional) old motel. These became the character sketches, which would eventually become the songs that populate the "Secretariat Motor Hotel". The "Secretariat Motor Hotel" is a dream recieved while sleeping soundly beneath the warm neon sign of the Comfort Inn and Suites in Jersey City, NJ. The denizens of the old hotel are most likely no longer living; in fact, the principal inhabitant of room number nine...one Mr. Shoeless G Walrus, had this to say over morning tea "if I was alive...I would be making country music...really fucking good country music". Then we ate.